It’s quite impossible to miss the enthusiasm in Paul Ha’s voice when he describes everything—and everyone—that is wonderful in St. Louis. As the executive director of Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (CAM), Ha appreciates the innovative spirit that has made CAM a leader on the national arts scene, and he welcomes the opportunity to honor local leaders who have demonstrated that same innovation and creativity outside of the art world.

Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis hosted its 5th Anniversary Gala at the Four Seasons Hotel St. Louis honoring homegrown artists Tom Friedman and Ernest Trova. Attendees enjoyed fine cuisine, delicious wines, and a benefit auction featuring works by Tom Friedman, Ernest Trova, Polly Apfelbaum, Maya Lin, and Alexander Ross raising significant funds for the museum’s exhibition and youth education programs including the award winning New Art in the Neighborhood and Contemporary ArtReach.

Contemporary was the theme as art intermingled with charity, which had supporters of the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis going gaga at the Dada Ball. Performance artists with an avant-garde flair greeted those in attendance with a colorful mix of theatrics, while the guests were sometimes indistinguishable from the performers in their wonderful array of attire.

Grief is a collective experience, common to all people and times. Mourning customs vary from culture to culture and era to era, but the immutable, overwhelming sense of loss remains the same. This timeless link is powerfully expressed in two upcoming exhibits at the Saint Louis Art Museum, The Mourners: Tomb Sculptures from the Court of Burgundy, and Bill Viola: Visitation, both on view June 20 through Sept. 6.

An unprecedented display of one of Japan’s most ancient art forms is coming to the Saint Louis Art Museum. Five Centuries of Japanese Screens: Masterpieces from the Saint Louis Art Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago opens Sunday, Oct. 18. “This is the first major exhibition of folding screens that goes beyond the end of Japan’s classical period in the mid-1860s, all the way to the late 1990s, and includes works by living artists,” says Philip Hu, associate curator of Asian art at the museum.

Visitors to the Saint Louis Art Museum will soon get a glimpse of masterworks from the age of Abstract Expressionism, hailed as the movement that altered the landscape of American art and shifted the center of the art world from Paris and Europe to New York City in the years immediately following World War II.

You can see artworks made by firing a pistol at paint-filled balloons, smearing mayonnaise on a canvas and drawing random numbers out of a phone book, all on display at Washington University’s Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum. They’re part of Chance Aesthetics, an exhibit that examines how avant-garde artists of the early 20th century used processes of chance to create their works and engage viewers. The exhibit features more than 40 artists, including Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock and Niki de Saint Phalle, using such strategies as collage, games, found objects and ‘automatism,’ a method of unconscious drawing. 

With a railway line bisecting his famous garden, Claude Monet could hear the trains carrying troops to battle in World War I, and the front lines were so close that the artist could hear the guns of war. Though the sounds and the times were chaotic, these were the years when the famous impressionist created what is perhaps the most enduring of his works: the serene Water Lilies of Giverny. Eight of the murals are on permanent display at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris, and the three paintings known as the Agapanthus triptych have been reunited for the first time in more than 30 years in Monet’s Water Lilies, opening in October at the Saint Louis Art Museum.

The large-format cameras developed in the 19th century may seem to be cumbersome antiques, no longer relevant in the digital age, but a new exhibition set to debut at the Saint Louis Art Museum showcases the relevance of this vintage equipment. “Many of these cameras were developed to capture broad landscapes, architectural studies or anything that required a lot of detail,” says Eric Lutz, associate curator of prints, drawings and photographs. “And now that we can print so much larger, we need to fill up these surfaces with a lot of detail, so these cameras are perfect, in a way. A lot of the photographers featured in the exhibition are using 19th century technology because nothing has been developed that works better.”

The Young Friends of the Saint Louis Art Museum welcomed artist Eva Lundsager to the Museum Friday, August 1, 2008 for a cocktail reception and presentation of “In a Broken Dream” (2007).

The Young Friends of the Saint Louis Art Museum, in partnership with the Flora Conservancy of Forest Park, held their third annual Bacchus at the Basin at the Grand Basin in Forest Park. As the official preview party for the St. Louis Wine Festival, the tikki-lit event included a spread of regional wines, as well as a variety of hors d’oeuvres from some of St. Louis’s finest caterers.  Live music by Erin Bode set a warm tone for this special dusky evening.